The hot summer noons and the long moonlit nights became sultrier and the leaves dropped. “How withered I am!” said the seed to his most intimate friend, a leaf that hung from a near bough. “It makes me feel quite brittle.” But the leaf did not answer, for just then it fell from the twig with a queer, reluctant shiver to the ground.
“Ah!” murmured the maple seed, “I understand.” So he was not surprised when a rude breeze twisted him off one day, and sent him spinning into space.
“Here I go,” thought he, “and this is the end of it.”
“Puff!” said the breeze, who had seen much of the world, and looked with contempt upon the untravelled. “Puff! how ignorant!” and he blew the seed right into a crack in the earth.
“It must be the end, for all that,” insisted the seed. No wonder he thought so, for it was cold and dark where he lay. A troubled cloud leaned down and wept over him. Then he began to grow amazingly in the warmth and moisture.
“If this goes on,” he thought, “I shall certainly burst, and then I must die. How is one to live, with a crack in his sides?”
But the maple seed was wrong. He did not die. An unsuspected, mysterious strength sustained him. His roots found food in the brown earth, and he lifted up a slender stem into the pure sunlight and warm air. Through spring, summer, autumn and winter, year after year, this lived and grew, until the tiny sapling had become a beautiful tree, with spreading branches.
“Ah!” said the tree, “how stupid I was.”
It was very pleasant on the lawn. An old couple from the house near by came out in good weather to sit under the tree. They reminded him of some fragile leaves he had seen fluttering somewhere in the past. He was glad to have them come, and he kept his coolest shade for them. Partly for their sakes, he liked to have the robins sing in his branches.
The years went by. The old man tottered out alone to sit in the cool shadow. He was bent and sorrowful.